Character versus plot
I recently watched The Stranger on Netflix (based on Harlan Coben’s novel of the same name). It was certainly gripping. I watched one of the eight episodes a night and I really wanted to know what had happened to the woman who went missing at the beginning. There was a lot of excellent acting and […]
Nasty People
Last summer at the St Hilda’s crime fiction convention I guessed who the murderer was (Val McDermid!) in the after dinner play. I wasn’t the only one to get it right, but mine was the name picked out of the hat, and the prize was a year’s subscription for a crime novel sent by Blackwells […]
Murder in Mind
I didn’t get round to posting my talk on Helen McCloy, which I gave at Bodies from the Library last year. So here it is now. The title is ‘Murder in Mind: The Crime Novels of Helen McCloy.’ My attention was first drawn to Helen McCloy when her novel, Mr Splitfoot, was listed by H. […]
Goodbye, Inspector Morse. Hello, Lewis.
Rather fittingly, I watched the last episode of Inspector Morse on New Year’s Eve. The first had aired in 1987 and this final one in 2000. I’d worked my way through all thirty-three in four or five months. By the end, the power-dressing of the 1980s was long gone and mobile phones were no longer […]
The glory that was Greece
For me one of the stand-out exhibitions of last year was Troy: Myth and Reality, which I saw at the British Museum a couple of weeks ago. There are some stunning objects – the vases in particular – and it was wonderful to revisit the stories of the Iliad and the Odyssey. I had a grammar […]
Happy Christmas
Season’s Greetings to all you readers, writers and bloggers out there and may you have a wonderful 2020! Our garden in the snow (not this year, I hasten to add!)
Interviewed by Sue Hepworth
It’s a busy time of the year, but I’ve taken time off from writing Christmas cards to be interviewed by writer Sue Hepworth on her splendid blog. You can find the interview here: http://www.suehepworth.com/2019/12/mystery-and-suspense.html .